LANDR Mastering Review- The Best AI Mastering Service Online? 

You’ve got your song mixed, and you’re excited to get it out there so people can listen to it on major streaming services, but you haven’t got it mastered yet and your budget can’t quite accommodate a mastering engineer to get your track to the standard you want it to be. 

So, what do you do? Well, with the rise of AI mastering services, you may just have an affordable alternative to a human mastering engineer. 

LANDR is one of the most popular and well-known AI Mastering services out there, alongside being used for music distribution, sample libraries, plugins and music production lessons. In this review, we will put it to the test and take a look at the results! 

LANDR Mastering Review

A side note on AI mastering versus a real mastering engineer: 

AI mastering is not better than a real, human mastering engineer for numerous reasons. The advantages of being able to work with and talk to your mastering engineer can give you a far more personalised approach, with results that will have lots of character and consideration for your music. 

Years of experience, expertise and style are what you get when you pay for a real engineer, and AI services do not replace or better that. Be mindful, however, of paying for cheap engineers, as usually the less you pay, the worse your result will be. 

Now with these things in mind, let’s get into the nitty gritty of LANDR! 

What is LANDR?

LANDR is a creative platform made in 2014 by musicians and music professionals alike that provides an AI mastering service, music distribution, plugins, opportunities for collaboration, promotion and sample libraries. 

Focusing on the mastering aspects of LANDR, the service uses an AI-powered engine that has some considerable backing from industry professionals who have worked with names such as Lady GAGA, Post Malone and many more. 

A seriously impressive amount of over 20 million tracks have been mastered through LANDR, with over 4 million users. LANDR seems to want to give the impression that this is a tool to be considered by professionals and beginners alike, in any genre. 

How much does it cost?

So how much for a tool such as this? Surprisingly little with lots of pricing options to choose from. For mastering specifically, LANDR offers $7 for a single master or two monthly subscription options. The first subscription, Studio, is $11.99 a month billed a year upfront for a total of $143.88.

The Studio subscription includes unlimited MP3 masters, 36 WAV masters per year and access to LANDR’s distribution services, sample packs, mixing and production courses and production tools such as Spitfire Audio, Arturia and IK Multimedia.

This subscription also comes with a cancel anytime monthly option for $19.99 a month. 

The second subscription option, Studio Pro, is $15.99 a month billed a year upfront for a total of $191.88. This subscription comes with unlimited HD WAV, WAV and MP3 masters as well as access to everything on LANDR. However, there isn’t a cancel anytime option with this plan. 

The value on offer here already is frankly, fantastic. Compared to other services such as eMastered and Cloudbounce, LANDR is giving you serious bang for your buck.

Not only offering an alleged industry-standard mastering service, but samples, distribution, mixing and production lessons and so much more for less money than eMastered! Which only offers a mastering service. 

$7 for a single master is also incredibly cheap, paying a real mastering engineer for this would not only have the potential to be considered an insult to their craft but also produce results that could be considered an insult to yourself too. So with enough about the cost, let’s get into the mastering! 

Using LANDR

Once you have an account with LANDR and have either paid for a master or subscribed (we are using the studio subscription), you simply upload the song you would like to master.

Once you have uploaded your track, it takes around 2-3 minutes to make a preview master, which is incredibly quick of course! 

With the track mastered, you can now hear it and switch between the master and the original mix.

Brilliantly, there is a volume match option which allows you to hear the master at the same volume as the mix so you can truly hear the difference between the two without being tricked by louder being better! 

There are some options to customise how your master sounds: Three compression styles which are warm, balanced and open.

The warm option offers a more vintage sound with less compression and a focus on getting a smooth and thick sound. The balanced compression prioritises clarity, and finally open emphasises punch and presence with a modern sound. 

The final customisation option is loudness which has three options, low, medium and high. These will boost the volume of your track, which results in a progressively more limited sound as you go louder and louder. 

Once you have finished with the master, you confirm the file format of WAV or MP3 and then about a minute later, you have your completed track which is stored on LANDR’s included cloud library.

You can listen to the full song against the original again, revise the master, get mix feedback from other users (for a price), release the track through LANDR’s distribution service or download the master. 

Now that we’ve outlined how it works, let’s test the service out on some tracks! 

Rock Song Example

All of the tracks we used to test out LANDR are from the Cambridge MT website. We started with the hard rock song ‘Flames’ by The Black Crown, and we used ‘Goliath’ by Karnivool as a reference, as they have quite a similar sound production and mix-wise. 

Starting with no customisation, with the compression settings on balanced and the loudness on medium, it’s easy to notice considerable changes to the sound especially with the volume match turned on. 

The track feels more cohesive with some noticeable saturation and compression, the mastering EQ has focused on bringing out the mids and highs in an audible yet smooth way, and it’s considerably louder without being able to hear the limiting going on. 

Now, we thought that the lows could do with a bit more presence in the mix to get closer to the sound of the reference track, so we picked the revised option which came with a surprising amount of options to further tweak the master.

Choosing to keep everything the same apart from the lows, we waited for the revised master to come through. 

After another minute or two, the new version was available to listen to, which had subtly added the low end we were looking for. With this addition to the master, the track felt a lot more connected across its frequency ranges. 

Out of curiosity, we wanted to see if the loudness could be pushed any further, so we got a final revision with it pushed a bit harder for volume. Sadly, the volume didn’t noticeably increase much to our surprise.  

Overall, this was a great start to using LANDR for mastering, it quickly produced a result that was usable in around five minutes.

The EQ additions were noticeable and enhanced the track, the volume was brought up without limiting or compression artefacts, and the improvement was undeniable. 

RnB Song Example

For this master, we used ‘Bankroll’ by Tytillidie x Xollllinnnn, with ‘Don’t Tell ‘Em’ by Jeremih as the reference. The vocal balance is quite similar in both tracks, with a noticeable yet smooth high end that is typical for the RnB/Pop genre.  

The stereo width was hugely increased on this master, with that noticeable but smooth boost to the mids and highs. However, we thought the low end felt quite unrefined and seemed to have some distortion. So once again, we went for a revision to see if we could tweak it a little. 

The loudness felt pretty good to us, as did the overall tone of the track, the low end just felt a bit unrefined.

We picked the option that said the low-end felt boomy and waited for our first revision of the track. The revision solved this issue, keeping the bass audible but without the distortion that was audible before. 

We weren’t as impressed with this master as the first, as it didn’t feel like the same clear improvement in quality over the original.

While the expected sound of the mix being glued together, boosted highs and mids and tightened low end were all present, the master lacked a lot of character and finish compared to other tracks in the genre. 

Dubstep Song Example

For our third example, we used ‘Centauri B’ by Brennon Causey, with ‘Tears’ by Skrillex as our reference track.

The latest Skrillex album is a showcase of a truly great EDM/Dubstep mix and master, with incredibly precise low end and smooth mids and highs, a no-brainer for a reference. 

With the genre in mind, we tried the open compression setting and high loudness on this track to make it sound like the competition.

The result was possibly the best master so far. Loud, wide, with bright, smooth highs but a satisfyingly deep low-end sound. 

With the quality of this result, we didn’t feel the need for a revision. The bass range of the track would be handled better in the hands of a real mastering engineer, but for an AI with essentially three options for the three frequency ranges, this was still impressive nonetheless. 

Pop Song Example

Our final master example will be ‘Never Let You Go’ by Brian C Cai Fei Hong, and our reference track will be ‘Closer’ by The Chainsmokers. With similar instrumentation and a bright, controlled, EDM-influenced pop sound this seemed to make sense as a reference choice. 

Listening to the preview, we experimented with the open compression setting once again but found it took away punch from the kick and bass compared to the balanced option, so we stuck with the balanced compression.

We did try out the warm setting but found it took away from the desired brightness for a pop master. 

With the finished result, the EQ and balance across the board were very good. The dynamic range was also still intact even with the loudness turned up too high.

However, the sibilance of the vocal was quite noticeable at points, which gave us a good excuse to try out the sibilance control on the revision settings. 

We used a light control on high voices, hoping this would just focus on the female vocalist rather than anything else. This worked rather well and resulted in this very usable master.

What Are Other People Saying About LANDR?

LANDR has a great reception online, averaging 4.3 stars on Trustpilot from 524 reviews. To get an idea of what could be going wrong for people when using LANDR, we went to look at the 1-star reviews on Trustpilot. 

The issues in these 1-star reviews ranged from distribution issues relating to cover art and samples, customer support speeds and issues with masters.

With these reviews, LANDR has responded to almost every single one, either offering further support or explaining the reasons for the issue. 

We went ahead and tested the customer support ourselves, finding a support bot that referred us to FAQ before sending us to a support email once we couldn’t solve our “issue”. We emailed support who got back to us within a day which is pretty good!

There were hardly any complaints about the mastering feature of the site, and what complaints there were often related to issues with their mix rather than the masters. 

Positive reviews mentioned the opposite of negative feedback, citing great customer support, good mastering and overall that LANDR is a great tool and service. 

Is LANDR Worth It? 

Absolutely yes. It is very hard to not be impressed with what is on offer here from the mastering, and then everything else that is included for the subscription fee, which seems like an obvious choice if you’re going to master more than one song with LANDR.

Even without mastering, it’s a service that gives you so much for your money!

The mastering itself is of a very good quality. It increases volume to industry standard without limiting problems, gives you lovely stereo width, EQ additions that enhance the feel and sound of your track and ultimately lends the finish that you would want from a master.

However, LANDR’s mastering runs into the common issue of AI mastering in that there isn’t a lot of character and the customisation is helpful but nowhere near what you would have with a real engineer. 

If you are starting out and want to hear what mastering can do for your music, or even if you’re a bit further than that and can’t quite afford an engineer just yet, LANDR is potentially a great service for you to invest in! 

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